Displaying items by tag: Hacking

There is a new player in the ransomware space. Dubber RA group this new organization appears to have had their grand opening last month (April 2023). RA Group published a data leak site on the dark web as part of the now all too familiar double extortion scheme that most ransomware brings to the table. RA Group is also one of the organizations that has leveraged the Babuk source code links to get things going, as reported by Cisco Talos.

There is an old saying that says, when you can no longer do, you teach. This might be a relatively true axiom in the regular world, but in the world of cybercrime it is certainly not what you find happening. Instead, we tend to see that when organized groups no longer want the headache and hassle of doing the heavy lifting for attacks, they just build a platform to sell their tools to others. We have seen ransomware as a service, malware as a service, malvertising as a service, and even phishing as a service.

Updated May-08-2023 with statement from Intel
Back in early April MSI, a popular PC and PC component maker, disclosed that it had a security incident. They stated that they quickly rolled out their Incident Response Team and enacted their recovery procedures (IR and BC/DR plans). Not much was known about the attack at the time, including when the incident happened, just that the disclosure was made to the relevant authorities.

Ransomware is a pain in the ass, no matter what type it is. You have a piece of code that comes in, encrypts all your files, steals them and then you must deal with paying a ransom of some sort to either get your files back or prevent potential disclosure of sensitive information. It is not exactly what you want to deal with on a given day. So, when a new method of deploying ransomware pops up you can excuse our thinking “oh what fresh hell is this”.

There you are doing your stollen credit card number shopping, like you do every Sunday. You come across a big batch of them, and the deal seems good. How do you know these things are real? I mean this isn’t exactly Amazon with reviews and a return policy. This is a dark web marketplace. The answer to your dilemma is to use a card checking service. One of, if not the, most popular services on the darker side of the web was Try2Check. I say was since this system was taken down by the US Government this week in what has been described as a multi-national operation.

DLL sideloading is a common technique for attackers to use when getting their malware in place and has been in use since around 2010. Simply put your malicious DLL in the same directory as the application and Windows in all its helpfulness loads it first instead of the legitimate one that might be in another directory. This method is also referred to as DLL search order hijacking. With the age of this technique and advances in EDR/MDR its usefulness has decreased.

The Open Source community has been one that many leverage to help build their applications. It has become a great place to find applications packages that make building out a larger application or eco systems less time consuming. We see this in just about every development space from large to small. Having helpful sources of working code can speed up the development lifecycle and allow for greater interoperability as many applications use the same dependencies and core functions. The open source community is a great resource and typically is one that you can trust to pull code from.

Blockchain, the immutable public transaction log where many say the future lies and the concept of “code is law” is often bandied about. However, the bank ending utopian promise of block chain and web3.0 has not exactly arrived and it is not as “de”centralized as it was supposed to be. Instead, the power and control of blockchain technologies, especially when is comes to currencies involved have been concentrated in a few groups while theft, scams and crime seem to be the most common things you read about it. So, what happened? The concept of Web 3.0 was not supposed to be like this.

SentinelOne’s threat team has been tracking a couple of threat groups with an unusual goal. These groups are not looking to steal money or get a ransom, instead they are looking to track, monitor and incriminate specific targets. The targets that have been identified so far have been journalists and activists that oppose government practices. So far, the countries where these groups have been identified are limited to India and Trukey but if threat groups like this have been found there, it is likely they are everywhere.

In early January 2021 North Korean hackers were in the midst of a campaign targeting western security researchers. They were looking to gather tools, vulnerability information and anything else of value they could get. The US, after learning about this attack did not have a significant response to the threat. Of course, the country was going through a bit of a political turmoil at the time, but there still should have been some sort of response to help prevent further attacks.